33. Chapter 33
Chapter 33
Riley
E mery insisted on finishing switching out the fall décor for Christmas while we talked. Matt and I swapped about half out already. I gave her the same summarized version of my past relationships that I had only given to my therapist and Matt. I told her about the pressure to love them the way they thought I should before I was ready. She was quiet for a while after I told her while we worked.
“Levi was abusive,” she blurted out. I blinked in surprise and tried to reorient myself in the conversation we were having. Levi. The ex-fiancé that I hated.
“I knew there was a reason I didn’t like him.”
“All of my exes were pretty toxic but he was worse than all the others. He had me so brainwashed I couldn’t even think about leaving. I thought he loved me. I loved him so much I kept convincing myself that things weren’t that bad, because when things were good, they were wonderful.” She threaded hooks through ornaments and passed them to me as she spoke.
“Em, I’m so sorry. I knew something was wrong. I should have tried to help you.”
She shook her head. “You couldn’t have done anything.” She paused and chewed on her lip. “We were trying to get pregnant. That’s why I started looking into PCOS. When I got my diagnosis, he left me.” She sniffled and swiped at her eyes. “He told me that I was too broken for him. He told me stuff like that all the time. I was too much and needed to learn to act more mature. I made myself so small for him and then he started telling me I was just a shell, and he didn’t know what happened to the woman he fell in love with.”
I squatted down on the floor next to her and pulled her into a hug. She tried to feed the hook into the ornament she held with shaking hands but kept missing the hole.
“I met Oliver after Levi left. He was amazing, Riley, the total opposite of Levi. I fell hard and fast for him, but I was so scared of getting hurt again. I ended up hurting him and breaking my own heart in the process because I was so scared.” She dropped the ornament and twisted her hands together. I held her tighter and pressed her face into my shoulder, swaying her back and forth as she cried. I had never seen Emery cry like this. Even when we were kids, and she would climb into my bed during one of our parents’ fights, she would just sit there wide eyed without a tear in sight. I did all the crying for both of us.
“I’m so sorry, honey. I wish you had let me be there for you.” I cried into the top of her head.
“Please don’t make the mistakes I did. Matt is a good one. Don’t let him go just because you’re scared,” she sobbed into my shoulder.
I held her until she stopped crying and kept holding her as she rested limply against me in silence. Matt was a good one. I didn’t doubt that for a second. I just didn’t know how to get past the roadblock in my head.
There was still one more thing we needed to address, the one thing that I had been struggling to decide if I wanted to know the answer to. Emery’s meddling in my relationship with Matt was worse than it had ever been and I couldn’t stop wondering how much she had known during our vacation. Did she push me to meet him because she knew that we would end up running back into each other in our real lives?
I pushed a few ornaments around in the box while I worked through the questions in my head. “Did you know who Matt was that day on the app?” I asked her.
Emery’s shoulders slumped. She pushed herself to her feet, her hands still shaking as she moved around the ornaments I’d hung on the tree. “Matt didn’t tell you?” She didn’t look at me when she spoke. She had to know that I overheard part of their conversation that day. Matt and I told each other everything, of course she would think I already knew how it had ended. “I didn’t know when I saw him on the app. Before, when Oliver talked about him, he never showed me recent pictures. I don’t know if you’ve seen pictures of Matt from high school but he looks a lot different now.”
He did look a lot different now. In high school he had been lanky with a mouthful of braces and hair long in his eyes like all the other teenage boys we went to school with. It wasn’t until after college that he became more recognizable as the person I knew now.
“But?” I prodded. She had told Matt she didn’t know at first. That had to mean she had figured it out before the day Oliver came over.
“But I couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked familiar. You know how bad I am at remembering faces,” she explained with a halfhearted laugh. “When I heard his last name at the district meeting it jogged my memory a little.” She tossed an ornament between her hands. “I did a little research during the meeting.”
During the meeting she had pushed us together. She could have told me who he was instead of making me think that she was trying to match me up with a stranger. “Why?” I didn’t even know what I was asking her.
“I knew anyone that Oliver cared that much about had to be a good person.” She shrugged her shoulders and glanced my way, an apologetic look on her face. “The things Oliver told me about him made me think that maybe he would be good for you.”
“Why were you so surprised to see Oliver the day of the apple festival?” Out of everything that was the thing that had made the least amount of sense. If she knew who Matt was surely she had to have known that eventually Oliver would be around. “Were you using us to get him back?”
Emery’s eyes widened and fresh tears sprang into them. I didn’t have it in me to feel sorry for her. She made this mess herself. Emery may act without thinking sometimes, but she was still smart. She said that day at the cabin she thought that me dating again would help break her curse. It all felt like too much of a master mind level plan. “I wasn’t using you, I promise. I didn’t think Oliver would ever want to see me again, so I thought if it ever came up he would avoid me. I just wanted you to be happy.”
I didn’t know if I believed her.